Companies of all sizes and specialties typically spend enormous amounts of money on marketing. These expenditures are often through many different channels, such as television advertisements, web advertisements, newspaper ads, etc. Associated with these marketing investments are the returns on these investments. Measuring a return on a marketing investment is typically extremely complex, due to the number of layers of options and data. For example, data can exist for each marketing product, channel, media, promotion, geographic scope, etc. The vast amount of data relating to a marketing expenditure does not, consequently, lend itself to analysis and optimization of a marketing investment.
Furthermore, to manage marketing investments, corporations typically create marketing plans. These plans are often spreadsheets. Plans of one department of the corporation, however, are commonly not accessible to other departments within the corporation. Additionally, a corporation may store their plans with a third party. Thus, the marketing plans are typically not centrally accessible, instead being dispersed through different departments within a corporation or at one (or more) third party. Therefore, the marketing of a corporation is often not well coordinated. This hampers the ability to monitor and track marketing investments and/or budgets versus actuals without much labor and manipulation.
Marketers also typically want to forecast future outcomes against specific business metrics to plan a corporation or department's supply chain, manage distribution channels, monitor the likelihood of meeting their goals throughout the course of plan cycles, and communicate financial projections to investors. Forecasts, however, are typically difficult to generate. For any given business, there are a large number of factors that influence the business outcome. Many companies generate forecasts through a manual process supported by documents (e.g., spreadsheets). This process can be burdensome and time-consuming, consequently making the improvement and updating of the forecast inputs unappealing and burdensome.
Thus, there is a need to organize, integrate, and analyze marketing metrics across marketing disciplines (e.g., a corporation's different product lines) to optimize marketing investments.